CoreDevApplication

I, Skia, hereby apply for core-dev.

Name

Florent 'Skia' Jacquet

Launchpad Page

https://launchpad.net/~hyask

Wiki Page

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/skia/


I am applying because:

  • I'd like to be able to officially join the Release Team.
  • I'd like to help smoothen the release process by being able to upload some bits by myself.
  • I'd like to be able to help more effectively during +1 maintenance shifts, that I enjoy particularly.

  • I'm aware that this is a straight to core-dev application, but this is what I need to actually better help the Ubuntu release process, and I would have a hard time justifying a PPU application. Also, MOTU wouldn't actually help me much, given the majority of my uploads, and particularly the ones that are part of my release work, are in main.

Who I am

This is almost plain copy-paste from my Contributing Developer application, given that the story hasn't changed.

My name is Florent Jacquet, but just call me Skia, even IRL, as everyone does.

I first installed Xubuntu 7.10 alternate edition on a 64MB RAM machine in 2008. The machine was already 10 years old by that time, but the lightweight system made it usable again, and it was great! Since then, I’ve installed a lot of {X,K,}Ubuntu on all my relative’s machines: parents, grand-parents, uncles, cousins, high-school companions, high school’s machines themselves, university friends and associations, you name it. I’ve personally distro-hoped for a while, but always kept either Debian or Ubuntu on my servers or machines that I wanted stable.

I now work since 2023-10-31 for Canonical as part of Foundations/Ubuntu QA/Release Management team.

My Ubuntu story

My involvement

Examples of my work / Things I'm proud of

Exhaustive list of my uploads is available here:

Below is a selection of those with some quick description and pointers, to make it easier to get an idea of my work. Please ask me about specific uploads that picks your interest and are not in the list.

Feature and bugfix uploads

Package Merges and Syncs

SRUs

Autopkgtest & DEP8

Proposed Migrations

Transitions

TODO: make some more

Milestones and Exceptions

+1 maintenance

MIRs

TODO mmdebstrap

Seed Operations

Working with upstream

Debian

Upstream projects

Misc

Bug Triage and reporting

I'm often exposed to bugs, either directly or indirectly through colleagues hitting them, so I try to report them as much as possible: Just a few examples:

As part of Foundations, I'm subscribed to a number of packages where I receive bugs and triage them. Just a few examples:

Areas of work

Since I'm working for Canonical, in the Ubuntu Release Management Team (Foundations), I'm very much involved with the release process of Ubuntu as a whole. In the past, I've also been involved in the maintenance of the autopkgtest.u.c infrastructure, and the tooling around that. In the coming future, I'd like to help automate as much as possible the release process, so that it's self-documented as code, and not tribal knowledge in people's head anymore.

On my free time, which I don't have much, I like maintaining and improving swaysome, and give a hand hosting Thread and Needles. I also like to maintain and improve my lovely little space of the Internet, as well as my self-hosted NAS running Armbian. As always, side projects come and go, but I generally like hacking and DIY many things more or less always related to free software.

Things I could do better

There are a few things I'd like to improve:

  • Write more bug reports. It's often that I have a few things hitting me on my machine, but it's way too often that I just workaround and forget about the problem, where I could actually spend time fixing things for real.
  • Take some time to improve my tooling and workflow. It's way too easy to get stuck with doing/using what I know, when sometimes there is a nice process/tool I see used by someone else, and would like to adopt it, but never get to it.

Plans for the future

General

  • Reach a state where one clicks a button and releases Ubuntu. That's a long shot, and there will always be some manual steps involved, but targeting that will bring many improvements already.
  • Help out set up what's needed to have nicer testing, especially around GUI. There is already ongoing work for that, but this will need integration, and a lot of work to have testsuites for everything. I'd like to give a hand, especially to flavors, to have them catch the train and improve the QA of the whole ecosystem.

What I like least in Ubuntu

  • Things are improving (a lot!), but the tooling is always a pain. On the top of my head, I could think of bzr, Launchpad's merge view, the seeds file format (wiki syntax, seriously???), the ubuntu-cdimage story, etc...

  • To compensate Launchpad being Launchpad, many repos within the Ubuntu world have moved to Github. While this brings nice modern features, it also reduces the integration of everything, like Ubuntu bugs, and sometimes makes it harder to discover where sources are hosted. I'm also wondering what would happen if Microsoft Github went down (or else, given current geopolitical context), regarding releasing Ubuntu, since some important repos are hosted there (like the models).

Comments

If you'd like to comment, but are not the applicant or a sponsor, do it here. Don't forget to sign with @SIG@.

Endorsements

TEMPLATE

== <SPONSORS NAME> ==
=== General feedback ===
## Please fill us in on your shared experience. (How many packages did you sponsor? How would you judge the quality? How would you describe the improvements? Do you trust the applicant?)

=== Specific Experiences of working together ===
''Please add good examples of your work together, but also cases that could have handled better.''
## Full list of sponsored packages can be generated here:
##  https://udd.debian.org/cgi-bin/ubuntu-sponsorships.cgi
=== Areas of Improvement ===

CategoryCoreDevApplication

skia/CoreDevApplication (last edited 2025-07-03 08:42:33 by hyask)